Mobile devices, such as cellular telephones, often have the capability to connect to the Internet in order to browse web pages and access other online content. Some current cellular telephones have a client, which enables the phone to form a connection with an Internet server. After the connection is established, the phone may request information, such as a web page for viewing, from the server. The server may then respond by transmitting the web page for viewing on the cellular telephone's display.
In other systems, cellular telephones may have search clients that communicate with remote search engines implemented at Internet servers. Users may enter search terms and select a type of search to transmit to the search engine. For example, the user may enter the search term “dog” and specify the search type as “images.” This information then may be transmitted to the search engine, which may generate results related to the search request and transmit the results to the cellular telephone. The cellular telephone could then display the search results, such as thumbnail images of dogs.
Wireless devices, including cellular telephones, may use the wireless application protocol (WAP) for accessing the Internet. The WAP is a specification that defines how the devices communicate with Internet systems. A WAP browser client may support languages such as HTML and XML to enable the display of digital content on a wireless device. However, using the WAP interface to establishing a connection between an Internet server and the browser may take several seconds.
For example, a browser on a cellular telephone may display a search page, which is employed by a user to enter search terms. After entering a search term and initiating a search, such as a search for images, a user may have to wait 6-8 seconds for the browser to establish a connection with the remote search engine, which begins to transmit the results to the phone. After all the results have been transmitted, the browser may display them to the user. If the user desires to view results of a different search type, such as web page URLs (uniform resource locators), the user may have to wait another 6-8 seconds for the browser to establish the connection for sending an additional search request and downloading additional results. In addition to such “latency” delay in forming a connection, delay may occur because wireless connections are relatively slow compared to fixed connections.
Other systems may use Short Message Service (SMS) to communicate with systems networked through the Internet. SMS enables a wireless device, such as a cellular telephone, to send queries as text messages. Connection time between the wireless device and the Internet systems may be less than what is required for WAP; however, the results returned are in plain text with no URLs, no web pages, and no images.